My phone buzzes twenty minutes later. I glance at the screen and feel the warmth in my chest ice over.
Lazovski. Her father. The number I've been expecting and dreading in equal measure.
I step into the corridor to take the call.
"Mr Orlov." His voice is oily, performance masquerading as warmth. The same tone he used when he shook my hand on the steps of this house twelve days ago. "I trust my daughter is fulfilling her obligations."
Obligations.
I lean against the wall and let the silence stretch one beat longer than comfortable. A technique that works on everyone: the pause that forces the other person to fill the gap, revealing more than they intend.
Lazovski fills it. "I've been fielding enquiries about the alliance, and naturally, I've been positioning the Lazovski interests alongside—"
"Your daughter is well," I cut in. Not to inform him. To redirect.
"Yes, well. Good." A beat. "And the matter of an heir? The council confirmed receipt of the, ah, verification. But I assume things are progressing as—"
"That's not a conversation I'll be having with you."
The silence on the other end is brittle. I can hear him recalibrating, adjusting the approach, searching for the angle that will give him leverage.
"Killian, I understand that you're a private man. I respect that. But as Katya's father, I have a right to know—"
"You have no rights concerning my wife." The words come out level, measured, quiet. The way I deliver everything that matters. "You surrendered those when you handed her over to a stranger."
Silence.
"Whatever relationship you believe this arrangement entitles you to, with Katya, with my family, with the territories you think my name gives you access to, I want to be very clear." I lower my voice, not for emphasis but because the truth doesn't require volume. "You will not contact my wife directly. You will not visit this estate without my explicit invitation, which you should not expect to receive. And the alliances you've been positioning yourself to exploit through this marriage will not materialize."
"You can't—"
"I can. I am. And if you test me on this, Mr Lazovski, you'll discover that the Orlov capacity for patience is matched only by our capacity for making men like you irrelevant." I straighten from the wall. "Give my regards to your wife."
I end the call.
He will never touch her again. Not physically, not emotionally, not through the insidious network of obligation and shame he's spent twenty years wrapping around her. I will dismantle him piece by piece, so quietly he won't realise it's happening until he's standing in the ruins wondering when the ground shifted.
I put my phone away. Compose my face. Walk back into the study.
Katya looks up from her book, reads something in my expression, but doesn't push. Instead, she lifts the corner of the blanket she's pulled over her legs in the armchair, a wordless invitation.
I cross the room, sit beside her in the chair that's technically too small for two people, and let her arrange herself over my knee. Her head settles on my shoulder. Her book rests in her lap.
"Everything okay?" she asks.
"Everything's fine," I say, and press a kiss to her hair.
She'll know I'm not telling her everything. She always knows. But she trusts me enough now to accept that some things I carry so she doesn't have to.
Katya
I catch myself humming in the shower and stop.
I stop because I don't recognize the behaviour. Humming is something other people do. People who have enough spare joy that it leaks out of them involuntarily, spilling into the small, unguarded moments when nobody's watching.
I have never been that person.
I stand under the hot water and let the steam fill my lungs and acknowledge, quietly, privately, like handling something fragile, that I might be becoming that person now.
